A lot of folks are very excited about Westworld, HBO’s upcoming sci-fi series, which is centered on a Wild West theme park in which automatons carry out whatever wild/twisted fantasies visitors can conjure up.
That said, those who have been waiting for this series with bated breath may have just received some bad news.
After September’s flap about the nature of the show’s sex scenes and the validity of the third-party consent form distributed to actors and extras, yesterday brought news that production would be shut down for two whole months and won’t resume again until March 2016.
Whether one has anything to do with the other is unclear and, according to HBO, the decision to halt production was made so that executive producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy could “… get ahead of the writing” and complete the first season’s final four scripts.
According to ScreenCrush, the planned 2016 premiere date remains unchanged, but since that date has yet to be made public, it’s hard not to take that information without at least a tiny grain of salt.
Perhaps some of this on-set controversy was to be expected, given that Jonathan Nolan has said of the show’s universe: “It’s a place where you can be whoever you want to be and there are no consequences — no rules, no limitations.” He has also said that his team’s aim was to create “the most ambitious, subversive, f*****-up television series.”
Westworld stars James Marsden, Evan Rachel Wood, Anthony Hopkins, Thandie Newton, Jeffrey Wright, and Ed Harris, an all-star ensemble cast that will be broken up (generally) into two camps: Those who inhabit the Old Western world, and those who work behind the scenes managing it.
An exact premier date for the series is still MIA but we’ll update you as soon as that information becomes available.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?